Victorian Food
The foods in victorian times By Jorge Diez The breakfast was about 9 oclock, then the lunch was taken about mid-day and was always followed by a wonderful pudding, finally dinner was a very grand meal with anything from 20 to 40 dishes in the menu! The tipical food of victorian times was Bacon, eggs, so much soup, fish, cheese and drinks like tea or cocoa. To deepen more in the theme I wanna put a quote explain the food of the working class on victorian times: "The better paid workers, especially those in whose families every member is able to earn something, have good food as long as the state of things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for supper. Where wages are less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find a small piece of bacon, cut up with potatoes, lower still, even this disappears, and there remains only bread, cheese, porridge and potatoes until, on the lowest rung of the ladder, potatoes form the sole food." (8http://www.redcarcleveland.gov.uk/rcbcmuseums.nsf/WebReadForm&id=05CFDA690CB9EA518025773E004D2D4F) The menu was often the same from week to week. Only some of the ingredients (such as the vegetables) changed with the seasons. The food was prepared and eaten to a more set pattern, often linked to the day of the week. For example, boiled beef and bones one day, pork another and fish on Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays were baking days, Saturday was another baking day. Only some of the constituents (such as the vegetables) changed with the seasons. For example, autumn was the time for jamming and preserving. The popularity of afternoon tea also saw the development of the tea room. Tea rooms became the place in town for social gatherings and chatter. From the 1860s onwards, it also became fashionable for men and women to eat out in restaurants. Before this, only men had eaten out in clubs or chophouses. Breakfast was an important meal. Even the simplest of middle class breakfasts consisted of bacon, eggs, ham, haddock, toast, coffee and fruits. This was followed by a light lunch midday. Eating a substantial meal in the evening, rather than the afternoon, was still a recent habit. From the 1860s, tinned meat was available. At first, this was mainly fat with just a few chunks of meat but it provided a cheap alternative for the poor, being less than half the price of ordinary meat. The late 19th century saw the range of available tinned food greatly increase, as canners competed with each other, using novel foodstuffs, highly decorated printed labels, and lower prices. The process of sealing food in airtight containers to preserve it developed in France during the Napoleonic era. At first bottles were used and later cans. Canning was patented in the United Kingdom in 1810. It was an expensive and time consuming procedure, mainly used for military supplies. As techniques improved, the demands of urban populations in Victorian Britain for large quantities of cheap, varied, easy to store food, increased. In response, companies such as Nestlé, Heinz, Crosse and Blackwell and others emerged to provide quality tinned food, for sale to working class city-dwellers. 15:24, July 27, 2012 (UTC) Food at Victorian Literature By Tomas Correa H. Calamitous shifts in food production and distribution, as well as a food scarcity that occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, established a preoccupation with hunger and food in much of Victorian literature. Even before these events befell England, however, the typical commoner's diet already proved meager. In The English Rural Laborer, G. E. Fussell cites Sir Frederick Eden's contemporary accounts of the rural poor, who were "habituated to the unvarying meal of dry bread and cheese from week's end to week's end" (Fussell 82). Likewise, in [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/ge/index.html Great Expectations], Pip's and Joe's pastoral meals consist of only bread and butter — the only two food items Dickens mentions again and again at the start of the novel. The latter half of the eighteenth century heralded the rise of the Industrial Revolution, during which rural laborers migrated en masse to the cities for employment. No longer able live off the land, and "alienated from their food source," this new working class became sensitive to fluctuations in food availability (Houston 8). Between 1815 and 1846, Parliament established the Corn Laws as a protectionist measure against cheaper foreign imports of wheat and other grains, collectively called "corn" in England (Bloy). Although the land-owning aristocracy benefited from increased profits brought about by the Corn Laws, the working class suffered mightily from high food prices. Compounded with the potato famine of the 1840s, this bottleneck on food availability caused great misery for much of England (Drake). During the decade that would come to be known as the Hungry Forties, the procurement of food escalated from daily nuisance to national obsession. Victorian literature, in turn, captures this obsession with food. Hunger serves as the driving force behind plots in many Victorian novels. For example, Great Expectations begins with Pip being throttled and threatened by the convict Magwitch, whose monstrous hunger is satiated by the food Pip steals from his own home. Later in the novel, Dickens reveals that Magwitch had devoted his entire life to the betterment of Pip, simply because Pip had helped him as a starving man. In Jane Eyre, the obsession with hunger presents itself in a lengthy description of the chronic undernourishment at Lowood School, where the scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid. From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion. Many a time I Jane have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger. Sufffering from unrelenting hunger, Jane meticulously accounts for her portions of food. Extreme hunger also compels the older girls to take advantage of the younger ones, paralleling the rampant food adulteration and the cheating of buyers by giving short weight during the early 1800s (Horn 50-51). Another instance of hunger driving the plot appears when Jane finds herself at the brink of starvation after running away from Rochester's estate. The "pang of famine" eventually takes her to the steps of a cottage where she meets St. John Rivers, who later informs the impoverished Jane that her late uncle John Eyre left her a fortune of 20,000 pounds. That hunger plays a pivotal role in Victorian storytelling demonstrates the pervasive threat of hunger throughout all levels of Victorian society. Even to the upper classes, hunger posed an indirect threat — for extreme hunger often leads to riots of the lower classes. The Victorians' preoccupation with food is shared not only by writers of fiction, but also by the day-to-day journalists and readers of newspapers. In The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel, Laura C. Berry notes that "endless stories of starvation and spoilage reprinted in the London Times. . .betrayed a nervous interest in what, and how much, paupers ate" (Berry 48). Thus, writing about hunger serves as a vehicle for conveying the underlying social malaise that occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution.